These Guys Found Out The Hard Way What It's Like To Live On $1 A Day

It's a fact that economics students Chris Temple and Zach Ingrasci couldn't get out of their heads.

"What can I do? That's the hardest part about it ... there is no one answer," says Temple. "[The U.S.] has poured $2.5 trillion dollars into international development trying to end poverty and a lot of times it just made things worse."

Together, the pair decided to take their studies outside the classroom, to someplace more practical — the edge of poverty itself. Living on $1 a day for two months, they moved to a remote Guatemalan town to study the people's relationship with money and see how access to credit could impact their survival.

They documented their journey in a new film called "Living On One."

Two Claremont McKenna College students moved to a remote village in Guatemala, where they would try to survive on an income of $1 per day for a total of 56 days.

"For all our academic learning, there were some things a textbook just couldn't answer."

They chose the town of Pena Blanca, which is majority Mayan.

Half the town's 300-some residents live below the poverty line.

They weren't interested in hotels. Here's where they (along with two videographers) lived for six weeks.

That meant sleeping on a bed of dirt with a few sheets of cardboard and blankets.

Fleas feasted on them during the night.

Here's their budget: $1 per day, per person for a total of $224.

To make their experiment realistic, they split the $224 into random denominations between 0 and 9. Each morning, they drew a slip of paper out of a hat with how much money they'd "earn" that day.

Their logic was simple: Most people in the town were day laborers and never knew how much they'd earn on a typical day.

Like a lot of people in the town, they decided to start their own small business with a micro-finance loan from a small nonprofit called Grameen.

With their loan, they invested in a small radish farm.

Some locals showed them to the town's only water source.

"Dude. There's a bug in there."

It was also loaded with sediment and (as they'd find out later) some nasty parasites.